The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis: New Yorks Antigone

Jerald E. Podair History, Lawrence University Saturday, October 6, 2001 On the morning of May 9, 1968, a Jewish junior high school science teacher named Fred Nauman received a letter that would change New York City. The letter Nauman opened that day was signed by the chairman of a local school board in Brooklyns predominantly black Ocean Hill-Brownsville section, which was part of an experiment in community control of the areas public schools. It told Nauman, a chapter chairman of the citys ninety-percent white, and majority Jewish union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), that he had been fired.1 The issue of whether this black local school board could fire this Jewish, unionized teacher on its own initiative, which was joined with this letter, would effect a fundamental shift in politics, culture, and race relations in New York City. It would result in a series of three citywide teachers strikes launched by the UFT in the fall of 1968 aimed at obtaining the reinstatement of Nauman and nine of his union colleagues, who were also fired by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local school board that day. Lasting almost two months in all, and affecting almost one million public schoolchildren, the strikes would be the most bitter in the citys modern history, rife with charges of racism, union-busting, and anti-Semitism. These strikes pitted the citys white middle class, which backed the UFT, against New Yorks black poor, and government, business, media, and intellectual elites, who rallied in support of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local school board

and the community control idea. They pitted the citys traditional liberals and emerging neo-conservatives against acolytes of the New Politics and the New Left. Most importantly, however, they pitted blacks against whites, and specifically, blacks against Jews. For both blacks and Jews, Ocean HillBrownsville was a crucial moment of self-revelation. It exposed the hidden fissures beneath the surface of what many had considered a model relationship. It forced each to confront unrealistic constructions of the other. And, it created an atmosphere in which continued Jewish ambivalence about white identity became impossible. Under pressure from the citys black community at Ocean Hill-Brownsville, New Yorks Jews, primarily those residing outside Manhattan in what were known as the outer boroughs, came to grips with their whiteness and began to align with white Italian, Irish, and Eastern European Catholics, who only recently had been their rivals. This shift, in which almost a century of ethnocultural animosity between Jews and Catholics was subordinated to the imperatives of race, would have farreaching consequences for political, economic, and cultural life in New York in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It sundered the informal political alliance between Jews, blacks, and white Protestants in New York that had defined the citys political culture since the end of World War II, by breaking off a crucial element outer-borough Jews - and aligning them with white Catholics. This new alliance reconfigured New Yorks political landscape rightward. Only once in the citys seven mayoral elections between 1973 and 1997 did voters elect the most liberal candidate available to them. New Yorks new governing coalition of outerborough Jews and white Catholics provided an electoral mandate for the service 2

reductions and budget cuts that marked the citys fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, cuts that disproportionately impacted the citys black community. Perhaps most significantly, by removing the mediating influence of the citys Jewish population, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy helped substitute race for religion, ethnicity, and class as the primary dividing line in New York politics and social relations. Before Ocean Hill-Brownsville, pluralist social scientists such as Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan could argue in their classic Beyond the Melting Pot for the existence of not one, but many New Yorks, defined by a series of overlapping ethnic, religious, racial, and economic identities.2 In its aftermath, they could only admit ruefully that race has exploded to swallow up all other distinctions, and conclude they had miscalculated: there were not many New Yorks, nor just one, but two.3 * * * *

In 1963, when the first edition of Beyond the Melting Pot appeared, however, any student of New York City politics and culture who predicted a rapprochement between the citys Jewish and white Catholic populations would have been greeted with raised eyebrows, if not outright derision. Certainly, Glazer and Moynihan themselves did not envision this outcome. Indeed, they observed that there is probably a wider gap between Jews and Catholics in New York today than in the days of Al Smith.4 The groups, they argued, were separated by two value systems, a Jewish and a Catholic ethos. The first was secular in its attitudes, liberal in its outlook, and positive about science and social science. The Catholic ethos, in contrast, was religious in its attitudes, and uncomfortable with liberalization ....in cultural and family life.5 3

These distinct cultural approaches had divided Jews and Catholics in New York for generations. By the early 1960s, they manifested themselves primarily in two areas: the controversy over separation of church and state, and the struggle between Jewish reformers and Catholic regulars for control of the citys Democratic party. The first issue tapped long-simmering Jewish fears and Catholic resentments. The aggressive effort by the citys most powerful Catholic leader, Francis Cardinal Spellman, to obtain state aid for parochial schools touched off a firestorm of opposition from Jews in the early 1960s. On the political front, the rebellion of Jewish-led reform Democrats against the Catholic-dominated Tammany Hall machine was reaching a climax, as regulars dug in for a final defense of what remained of their organizational prerogatives. It was at this time, however, when relations between Catholics and Jews in New York appeared to be at a low ebb, that the seeds of eventual reconciliation were planted. On the international level, the Second Vatican Council officially absolved Jews of complicity in the death of Christ and called for improved relations between the two groups. Nationally, the rise of the Kennedys provided an example of intellectual sophistication and cosmopolitanism that softened the image of Catholics among American Jews. And on the local scene, Cardinal Spellman, who was regarded by much of New Yorks Jewish community as antiSemitic, died in 1967. His successor, Terence Cooke, had grown up with Jewish friends in an ethnically-mixed Bronx neighborhood, and moved to establish lines of communication with Jewish leaders.

The most important factor in rehabilitating Jewish-Catholic relations in New York, however, was the emergence of race, long sidestepped by even selfstyled liberals, as the major issue in city life. For outer-borough Jews, the cutting edges of the race issue, by the mid-1960s, were in the areas of crime and education. The citys violent crime rate had skyrocketed between 1960 and 1965.6 Many outer-borough Jews believed that this increase was traceable to the citys rapidly-growing poor black communities. Between 1940 and 1965, New Yorks black population tripled, as a great wave of migrants poured in from the South.7 The migrants pushed out of older black neighborhoods like Harlem and BedfordStuyvesant and into adjoining areas, like Ocean Hill-Brownsville, from which whites, including large numbers of Jews, promptly fled. Black newcomers to the city during the quarter-century following World War II were caught on the wrong side of a seismic economic shift. New York lost almost half of its unskilled and semi-skilled manufacturing jobs - jobs that had been a lifeline to white immigrants earlier in the 20th century, and which the newcomers had hoped to obtain.8 They were replaced by positions in white-collar service areas - corporate, finance, real estate, insurance, law - as well as in the expanding public sector, which required education and skills the black migrants largely did not possess. This closing off of a traditional route of upward mobility, combined with the de facto housing segregation that prevailed in the city after World War II, created economically and geographically isolated ghettos. The fact that the increase in the citys crime rate during the 1960s was traceable to objective conditions, however, was largely lost on New Yorks outerborough Jewish population, which reacted with hard-line, law-and-order 5

positions similar to those its white Catholic neighbors had espoused for years. An example of this new-found Jewish-Catholic common cause came in 1966, when a proposal for the creation of a civilian review board to investigate allegations of police brutality was placed on the ballot as a referendum issue. Despite support from the citys black community, as well as white Protestants and Manhattan Jews, the review board proposal went down to defeat, as outer-borough Jews joined white Catholics in voting against it.9 It was the first time in decades, observers of New Yorks political scene noted, that the two groups had aligned on a major civic issue.10 The other aspect of the racial issue that drove outer-borough Jews away from blacks and toward white Catholics lay in the area of education. Outer borough Jews were no more willing in practice to send their children to school with blacks than were Catholics, who made fewer public bones about it.11 In 1963 and 1964, the height of the movement to integrate New Yorks public schools, Jews in Queens and Brooklyn joined with white Catholics to form Parents and Taxpayers, a militant anti-busing organization that eventually boasted half a million members. The group, whose acronym - PAT, as in standing pat, was appropriate - flooded the city Board of Education with petitions, staged massive City Hall demonstrations, and, in a first for any Northern city during the civil rights movement, even established a separate private academy. PATs efforts were instrumental in the defeat of integration initiatives in the citys public school system.12 Under the pressure of race, the Jewish-Catholic issues that Glazer and Moynihan had viewed as insurmountable only a few years before were receding 6

into the background. By the late 1960s, the regular vs. reformer political battle, for all intents and purposes, had been settled in favor of the latter, and victorious anti-machine Jewish politicians, like the citys fixture mayor, Edward Koch, were beginning to build bridges to Catholic leaders they had only recently derided as hacks. The newly-installed Cardinal Cooke was reaching out to the citys Jewish community. It would, however, take the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school decentralization controversy of 1968 to cement this developing alliance. By 1967, it was clear that white parent resistance had succeeded in derailing the school integration movement in the city. In response, black leaders demanded the right to control the operation of schools in their neighborhoods. During the summer of 1967, the citys central Board of Education began an experiment in community control of schools in the predominantly black Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Ocean Hill-Brownsville residents elected a local board to run their schools. The local board received strong support from city elites, who hoped to use it to avoid urban unrest. These included New Yorks patrician mayor, John Lindsay, and the Ford Foundation, which provided much of the funding for the experimental project. Community control was also attractive to much of the citys media, as well as to New Left-influenced intellectuals drawn by its link to the principles of participatory democracy. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville local board soon clashed with the UFT over the extent of its personnel powers. The local board claimed the power to hire and fire teachers and administrators in the district; the union argued that only the central Board of Education could perform these functions. Both sides realized that whatever was decided in Ocean Hill-Brownsville would become a precedent for 7

the entire city, lending a heightened, symbolic quality to the developing showdown. The argument over how teachers and administrators in the New York public schools would be selected became a microcosm of the different ways in which blacks and Jews had come to define the idea of equality in city life. Black activists had long chafed at the relatively low percentage of black educators in the school system; in the mid-1960s, only 8% of its teachers, and 3% of its administrators, were black, despite a minority student enrollment of over 50%.13 Blacks argued that the series of strictly-monitored civil service examinations that governed hiring and advancement were racially biased, citing their disparate racial outcomes. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville local board accordingly demanded the right to choose personnel from outside the ranked civil service eligibility lists. To the Jewish members of the UFT, however, these lists were an article of faith, an essential part of their system of values. If New Yorks postwar shift from an industrial to a service-based economy had victimized much of the citys black population, Jews had benefited from it. Jews viewed the civil service apparatus as symbolic of the meritocracy that they believed the city had become after the war, a city where only ability, not ethnic background or social status, mattered. Many had bitter memories of the quotas that had kept them, or their parents, from entering fields such as law, medicine, and university teaching. To them, the raceneutral meritocracy of the civil service examination system epitomized the idea of equality. Writing in Commentary, Nathan Glazer explained this sentiment and linked it to a larger trend toward objective meritocracy in post-World War II America. Jews, he observed, have put their faith in the abstract measures of 8

individual merit - marks and examinations. Moreover, the democracy of merit that has been so congenial to Jews ...is being increasingly accepted by everyone else nowadays under the pressure of a technological world. We are moving into a diploma society, where individual merit rather than family and connections and group must be the basis for advancement .... The reasons have nothing to do with the Jews, but no matter - the Jews certainly gain from such a grand historical shift. Thus, Jewish interests coincide with the new rational approaches to the distribution of rewards.14 But Glazer also understood that black Americans - with good reason, in view of their experiences - questioned the very principles that Jews accepted. The test culture, after all, had not worked for them. Thus, Glazer wrote, when Jews told blacks (y)ou must earn your entry -through grades and exams, (blacks), with a good deal more knowledge of the realities of American society... answer but we know how you got ahead - through political power and connections and the like, and therefore, we wont accept your pious argument that merit is the only thing that counts. There is, Glazer allowed, some truth to this rejoinder. But, he cautioned, there is much less truth when it is made to Jews.15 And this, in the context of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, was precisely the problem. Jewish UFT members who defended the civil service examination system argued that it guaranteed equal treatment to all, and in any case, that they had succeeded under the rules without special benefits. But black critics countered that no such thing as a race-blind meritocracy existed, either in New York or America as a whole - the proof was in the numbers - and that Jews were merely white beneficiaries of an institutionally biased system. Thus, on the eve of the 9

Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis in May 1968, Jews and blacks in New York disagreed not only on the specific issue of whether applicants who had not passed civil service examinations could be appointed to positions in the public school system before those who had done so, but, more generally, about the meaning of equality, the legitimacy of the idea of meritocracy, and the construction of white identity in city life. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville local boards decision to test its power against the UFT by sending a dismissal letter to Fred Nauman crystallized these issues, forcing Jews, blacks, and eventually all New Yorkers, to come to grips with them. * * * *

Negotiations aimed at obtaining the reinstatement of Nauman and his UFT colleagues dragged on through the summer of 1968, amid an escalating level of rhetoric that painted each side into a corner. Finally, in September 1968, with neither the union or the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local board willing to compromise, the UFT struck all of the citys schools, the first in a series of three strikes that lasted until mid-November. The strikes divided the city into two hostile camps. The Ocean HillBrownsville local board, the citys black community, and local board allies among Manhattan government, business, media, and intellectual elites charged the UFT with racism. The UFT, supported by mainstream labor leaders and most of the citys outer-borough white middle-class population, accused its opponents of class bias, union-busting, and anti-Semitism. The UFT circulated anti-Jewish material that had appeared in Ocean Hill-Brownsville.16 Jewish UFT members picketed the offices of the Ford Foundation and the New York Times, and heckled 10

Mayor Lindsay at public appearances.17 Racial and religious epithets were the order of the day on picket lines and at the demonstrations organized by each side on almost a daily basis. During these angry weeks, the gestating rapprochement between Jews and Catholics in New York City finally reached fruition. White Catholics backed the UFT in overwhelming numbers; their percentage of support for the unions position was higher, in fact, than that of Manhattan Jews.18 Jewish teachers gratefully accepted this support. Catholic policemen, long viewed with suspicion in the Jewish community, were now the teachers protectors from hostile blacks. The cultural and ethnoreligious issues that had separated the two for generations now seemed to melt away before observers eyes, replaced by the shared bonds of racial identity. A writer for the Nation covering a UFT picket line in Ocean HillBrownsville remarked on the unlikely affinity between the Jewish teachers and Irish Catholic policemen. As the two groups talked amicably, separated by barricades from angry black demonstrators, the writer saw the policemen smiling at the birth of an ally.19 Another observer was surprised to see outer-borough Jews running around like Brooklyn Tablet Catholics, referring to a conservative local Catholic newspaper.20 And a report on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute confirmed the existence of a new coalition of Jews and white Catholics, based on mutual fear... (of) the thrust of the blacks.21 Simultaneously, Ocean Hill-Brownsville was wrecking black-Jewish relations in the outer boroughs of New York. Jewish leaders who expected their black counterparts to denounce the anti-Semitic material that circulated during the strikes were angered when they were rebuffed. Black officials hesitated not 11

because they were anti-Semitic themselves, but because, in the words of one, if a black leader is to be responsive to the needs of his people, he cannot be a Jewish leader, he must be a black leader. By definition, this means that the interests he represents will sometimes be in conflict with other groups, sometimes Jewish groups.22 A black administrator at Ocean Hill-Brownsville was more blunt: We have more things to be concerned about than making anti-Semitism a priority.23 But black leaders themselves were also disappointed in their expectation that Jews would support the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local board. The real Jews, wrote one such leader, are out on the street helping us. The others... are rejecting their own heritage.24 Another argued that the essence of responsible Jewish identity was support for the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local board.25 The black-Jewish feud at Ocean Hill-Brownsville was more than just a case of unrealistic expectations and demands, however. When black writer James Baldwin, referring to the Ocean Hill dispute, said it is cowardly and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man, he captured what was driving Jews away from blacks, and toward white Catholics, at this time.26 Black intellectuals like Baldwin, Harold Cruse, and Julius Lester had long complained of Jewish ambivalence - an ambivalence of convenience, in their view - toward their white identity.27 These criticisms peaked during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy. Black local board supporters responded to allegations of antiSemitism by arguing that they harbored no special animus toward Jews. They opposed them, they maintained, not because they were Jewish, but because they were white. As the black cultural journal Liberator put it, (t)he Jew should not be

12

singled out for any particular righteousness or duplicity. For ultimately, in the American context, he is a white man, no more, no less.28 Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, New York Jews had indeed constructed a dual identity, one that was not black, but not quite white, either. This stance had its benefits, to be sure. It allowed Jews the option of identifying as white, or, when this was deemed inappropriate, as a besieged minority group. But at Ocean Hill-Brownsville, black resentment of this positions privileges finally burst to the surface. Jews would no longer be permitted the luxury of ambivalence about their whiteness: they would have to make a choice. And, during the bitter days of September, October, and November 1968, the Jews of New Yorks outer boroughs made their choice. Pushed by a black community that regarded them as whites, no more, no less, and pulled by the promise of a race-based coalition with white Catholics, they completed their journey to unambiguous white identity, the last group of Caucasians in America to do so. The legacy of this choice would be reflected in a New York so deeply divided by race that other considerations - class, religion, ethnicity - lost much of their relevance. Ocean Hill-Brownsville, in that sense, had forced all New Yorkers to choose. * * * *

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes finally ended in mid-November 1968, substantially on the UFTs terms. Fred Nauman and his union colleagues were reinstated, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community control experiment itself was discontinued shortly thereafter. Local school districts in New York were 13

never successful in obtaining the broad powers over personnel that the Ocean Hill board had sought. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversys significance, however, went well beyond the area of educational policy. It helped to redefine the politics and culture of New York City in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. After Ocean HillBrownsville, outer-borough Jewish voters shifted to the right, moving closer to their white Catholic neighbors. Jewish votes had helped elect John Lindsay mayor in 1965, despite the fact that he was opposed by a Jewish candidate. Four years later, in the wake of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, almost 60% of the citys Jews opposed him (with an even higher percentage in the outer boroughs), dividing their votes between two conservative Italian-American candidates. The citys next mayoral election, in 1973, produced its first Jewish mayor, Abraham Beame, elected with strong Jewish and Catholic support; Beame had been the candidate Lindsay defeated in 1965. And, in 1977, outer-borough Jewish and Catholic votes were the crucial component in the electoral victory of Edward Koch, who would dominate city politics for the next twelve years.29 Kochs political style, despite his Manhattan roots, was that of the outer-borough white ethnic politician. He was a reflection of his core Jewish constituency, a white middle-class moralist whose rightward shift owed much to the events of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy. Historian Godfrey Hodgson has argued that Ocean Hill-Brownsville tipped the balance from liberal to conservative predominance in New York City politics.30 While this may have been an overstatement - the city did not abandon its traditional commitment to the principle of government aid to its citizens - the 14

shift in the citys political landscape that the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis produced did provide a mandate for a readjustment of this commitment. The actions of city officials during the citys fiscal crisis of 1975 made this abundantly clear. Under pressure from institutional lenders and the Ford Administration, they acquiesced in sharp cutbacks in municipal spending, services, and employment. City leaders ceded much of their power to a financial control board dominated by business interests, from which black representatives had been deliberately excluded. The board froze public assistance payments and housing subsidies, closed municipal hospitals, scaled back city services, and laid off thousands of workers. While the city as a whole suffered under these blows, the black community suffered the most, because it had the most to lose.31 Few of these measures would have been viable a decade earlier, before Ocean Hill-Brownsville, when outer-borough Jews still eyed white Catholics with suspicion. Ocean Hill-Brownsville had made it impossible for Jews and blacks to forge an alliance against the citys fiscal austerity policies. For them, race and memory now transcended even the imperatives of the pocketbook. Ocean Hill-Brownsville taught Jews and Catholics that the whiteness uniting them was more important than any of the things that had divided them in the past. In outer-borough neighborhoods like Forest Hills and Canarsie, Jews stood alongside their Catholic neighbors to keep blacks out: out of their homes, in the case of Forest Hills, where in 1972 a Lindsay-backed low-income housing plan was defeated by community pressure, and out of their schools, in the case of Canarsie, where Jews and Catholics worked together in 1972 and 1973 to block a Board of Education initiative that would have bused in black students.32 15

Jonathan Rieder, in his study of the latter community, Canarsie, observed that Ocean Hill-Brownsville had marked the Jewish passage from optimistic universalism to nervous provincialism.33 While the secular Jewish and traditional Catholic value systems that Glazer and Moynihan had described a decade earlier still had relevance, the distance between them had narrowed appreciably. In their second edition of Beyond the Melting Pot which appeared in 1970, Glazer and Moynihan observed that Jews have become far more aware of the virtue of conservative working-class and middle-class values, which they always practiced but refused to celebrate.34 In post-Ocean Hill-Brownsville New York City, Jews had come to regard these values as unapologetically their own. Moreover, they had come to identify them with their white Catholic neighbors, and, by extension, as foreign to the citys black population. By the 1980s, New Yorks Jewish mayor, Edward Koch, who as a child had fled in fear from Irish Catholic bullies, now regarded John Cardinal OConnor, Cardinal Cookes successor as head of the New York Archdiocese, as one of his closest personal friends. Their 1989 co-authored volume, His Eminence and Hizzoner, a chatty collection of correspondence that celebrated this friendship, was a fitting symbol of Jewish-Catholic reconciliation. It was Ocean HillBrownsvilles legacy to a changed city.35 In New York today, over thirty years after the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local board tried to fire Fred Nauman, differences among white groups continue to shrink, leaving one basic divide fracturing the citys politics and culture. Whether the differences between white and black New Yorks can be mediated is, of course, an open question. It may ultimately require the elimination 16

of whiteness itself as a social category in order to do so.36 If this, indeed, is the task facing the city in the 21st century, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute and the succeeding three decades provide few grounds for optimism.

NOTES
1

Marilyn Gittell and Maurice Berube, eds., Confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville (New York: Praeger, 1969), 33. 2 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963). 3 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2d ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), viii. 4 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 299. 5 Ibid., 298. 6 Police Department of the City of New York, 1966 Annual Report, 29. 7 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 2d ed., xxxi, 319. 8 Eric Lichten, Class, Power, and Austerity: The New York City Fiscal Crisis (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1986), 75; Harold X. Connolly, The Economics of Blacks in Brooklyn, 15, December 8, 1979, unpublished paper, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY. 9 John Hull Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 88; Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 77; Tamar Jacoby, The Uncivil History of the Civilian Review Board, City Journal, Winter 1993, 56-63. 10 Ibid. 11 Kurt and Gladys Lang, Resistance to School Desegregation: A Case Study of Backlash Among Jews, Sociological Inquiry, 35 (Winter 1965), 94-106. 12 David Rogers, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City Schools (New York: Random House, 1968), 76, 86-89, 311; New York Times Magazine, September 20, 1964, 46-49; New York Times, March 13, 1964, 1, 20, 23; March 17, 1964, 1, 25; May 19, 1964, 1, 29; September 14, 1964, 1; October 6, 1964, 29; March 22, 1965, 35; May 17, 1965, 30; December 14, 1966, 37. 13 Reconnection for Learning: A Community School System for New York City - Report of the Mayors Advisory Panel on Decentralization of the New York City Schools, November 9, 1967, 44-45, 74, New York City Board of Education Papers, Rose Shapiro Collection, Box 8, Columbia Teachers College, Special Collections, Milbank Memorial Library, New York, NY (hereinafter Board of Education Papers, Shapiro Collection); Martin Mayer, The Teachers Strike: New York, 1968 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 17; New York Times, June 7, 1966, 1, 36. 14 Nathan Glazer, Negroes and Jews: The New Challenge to Pluralism, Commentary, December 1964, 32. See also Milton Himmelfarb, How We Are, Commentary, January 1965, 406. (Jews, especially, hold (principles of objective merit) to be self-evident. They are our ideology and they are our self-interest, because we do well when they prevail. For us these rules, these truths, define justice itself.); Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). 15 Nathan Glazer, Negroes and Jews: The New Challenge to Pluralism, 31-32. 16 If African-American history ...., Flyer, n.d., Board of Education Papers, Shapiro Collection, Box 8; New York Post, June 29, 1968, 21; Amsterdam News, August 10, 1968, 10; M. Mehlman, The Anti-Semitic Thrust in the Public Schools, September 15, 1968, Board of Education Papers, Shapiro Collection, Box 8; OAAU Bulletin, October 3, 1968, Board of Education Papers, Shapiro Collection, Box 7; Build a Black Department Store, n.d., Board of Education Papers, Shapiro Collection, Box 7; OAAU Bulletin, January 22, 1969, Board of Education Papers, Shapiro

17

Collection, Box 7; Leaflet, Jamaica Alliance for Community Control, n.d., Board of Education Papers, Shapiro Collection, Box 7. 17 New York Times, September 27, 1968, 51, 52; October 16, 1968, 1; November 7, 1968, 43; United Teacher, October 24, 1968, 14. 18 Louis Harris and Bert E. Swanson, Black-Jewish Relations in New York City (New York: Praeger, 1970), 132, 135, 152. 19 Nation, November 18, 1968, 524. 20 Robert F. Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 195. 21 Louis Harris and Bert E. Swanson, Black-Jewish Relations in New York City, xxii-xxiii. 22 Amsterdam News, December 14, 1968, 13. 23 Time, January 31, 1969, 58. 24 Integrated Education, January-February 1969, 22-23. 25 African-American Teachers Forum, November 1968, 2. 26 Robert Campbell, The Chasm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), xx. 27 Interview, Julius Lester, Evergreen Review, April 1965, 22, 25, 71-73; Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 52, 57, 151, 168, 483, 496. 28 Liberator, March 1968, 19. 29 John Hull Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes, 65, 88-89, 100-110. 30 Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 416. 31 See generally, Eric Lichten, Class, Power, and Austerity; Roger E. Alcaly and David Mermelstein, eds., The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities (New York: Random House, 1977); Martin Shefter, Political Crisis, Fiscal Crisis: The Collapse and Revival of New York City (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Charles R. Morris, The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment, 1960-1975 (New York: Norton, 1980); William K. Tabb, The Big Default (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982). 32 See generally, Mario Cuomo, Forest Hills Diary (New York: Vintage Books, 1974); Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie. 33 Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie, 73. 34 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 2d ed., viii-ix. 35 John Cardinal O Connor and Edward I. Koch, His Eminence and Hizzoner: A Candid Exchange (New York: Morrow, 1989). 36 See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); John Garvey and Noel Ignatiev, eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996).

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